Smart Watches: Ravishing, and Creepier than Google Glass

Samsung’s new Gear S smart watch, introduced yesterday, is ravishing. The sexy, curved screen, the fact it’s a 3G phone, the 4GB of storage. It may well inspire that techlust that periodically sends hipsters and Valley bros into a tizzy, like the iPhone, or Google Glass.

The initial lust for Glass, though, has given way to skepticism, even rage. We’ve marked ”Glassholes” as a kind of tech bully for whom consent to be evaluated and recorded and published is a priori. Some people are so uncomfortable with Glass that they’ve created devices to jam its wi-fi when it’s nearby.

As creepy as Glass can be, a smart watch is far more insidious, because it creates the same asymmetric power dynamic as Glass–I control the space around me and choose what data is captured and distributed–but in a far less conspicuous way. Wearing Glass is still unnatural and easily identifiable. Wearing a watch isn’t. As devices sink into our our clothes and our selves, the privacy implications of their capabilities become more pressing to talk about, and control.

So be prepared for stories about diners who don’t like their service surreptitiously recording interactions with waitstaff and posting to Facebook. Expect stories of disgruntled employees capturing the behavior of colleagues and using it as whistle blower fodder. Corporate spies must be salivating over these things.

At this point, those same hipsters and Valley bros have likely lined up their counter arguments to privacy advocates’ concerns. Let’s take them on one-by-one.

Anything you can do with a smart watch you can already do with a phone. This is true, and also not a justification to plow forward unthinkingly. The conversation about moral and legal boundaries of device usage should also apply to phones (which are also becoming ‘invisible’ to us) as much as any other device that allows for non-consensual data gathering.

People will get used to it and adapt, just like they did with smart phones. Probably true, but why can’t adaptation include conversations about appropriate and legal use to ensure privacy, especially as technologies like smart watches push the boundaries of invasiveness combined with anonymity or invisibleness.

You can’t stop technological progress. The progress crutch is as facile as it gets. The fact that we can introduce a new or improved technology doesn’t provide de facto license to do with it whatever we want. To understand why, just apply that logic to drones, cloning, or guns.

You have no privacy. Get over it. Along with its companion proposition, “If you have nothing to hide, why do you care?” this is one of the most common, and most vapid, anti-privacy arguments, because it’s based on a mistaken notion of what privacy is. Privacy is not a tallying of what information is kept hidden versus what’s out there. Privacy is an individual’s right to selectively decide what is revealed. A company can have ensured my privacy and also have a map of my genetic material, if they’ve given me the choice to divulge that to them first.

Smart watches are coming. They’re beautiful. They may rapidly pass Google Glass in deployment. If Glass haters are serious about their resistance to the technology, they should reserve some of their social disdain, and innovative counter measures, for a technology just as powerful, but far less conspicuous.

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